


Twin Fawn

by bloodravenclaw



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 12:38:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16810783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodravenclaw/pseuds/bloodravenclaw
Summary: Set towards the end of the novel, when things between Camilla and Charles are falling apart. Camilla's reflections on events and on her relationship with Charles.





	Twin Fawn

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song "Twin Fawn" by Chelsea Wolfe-- I heard it the other day and it reminded me so much of Camilla and Charles (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsl769fi20E). I am a very ineffective student and wrote this instead of doing my final projects. I hope you enjoy it.

The springtime always made her feel strange. After the months of quiet snow and early darkness and bone-chill, the warmth and greenness felt unnatural and too-much. It put her off-balance, the warmth made her groggy, her mind would flash back to past autumns and springs if the weather and light happened to hit the right note. Nothing felt real. Even at the best of times, the end of winter set her mental state reeling, and this one, after the false spring and the unexpected snows of Bunny’s death and the unrelenting tension that came after, was worse than most springs. She twisted shut the blinds of her room, dragged her suitcase from her closet.

Henry was coming over later, to help her move out. That didn’t feel real, either. They’d talked it over plenty of times; It’d been her idea, even. But she still felt as though she’d return after the weekend, like it was just a short trip to Francis’s house and she’d be coming right back.

Maybe it would feel more real once she’d packed up her room.  
But even then the sense of unreality persisted, oozing out of the empty desk drawers and collecting like dust bunnies in the corners of the gutted wardrobe. She sat on the edge of the just-made bed, neater than it ever had been when she lived there. She closed her eyes, then opened them. She couldn’t just sit in here waiting until Charles left the apartment. She couldn’t.

She walked out to the living room. Charles lay asleep on the couch, even though it was almost noon. Empty whiskey bottle on the floor by his hand. She sat on the arm of the couch, looked down at his face. Asleep, he looked peaceful, her handsome brother, heartbreakingly beautiful in the warm dimness. 

And yet, when she looked at him these days she hardly recognized him, with the dazed glazed eyes and the unsteady slurring voice. He used to be her mirror image, her other half. Where had he gone? Who was this stranger in her house, peering out of his dove-gray eyes, speaking with his voice, but so unfamiliar, so volatile, striking her when once he couldn’t bear to see her in pain? She remembered the shard of glass in her foot and the shards of glass in the fireplace. The broken mirror on the wall and the broken mirror to her soul. But she loved him, she still loved him, after everything.

How could she not love him, her brother, her lover, with her from the start? He came into the world at her heels, they had always been as one, how could it be a sin? _Birth, reproduction, death. Banal cycle, divine mystery._ They’d been through the first two together, and here they were, maybe, at death. Hadn’t he tried to kill her? Wouldn’t it be fitting, really, if he did, or it they went out together? They’d seen death twice already, and if they didn’t deserve it now, it had a sense of the poetic about it. Why shouldn’t they meet the end together, as they had everything else? But somehow she couldn’t. As much as she loved him, as much as she couldn’t imagine herself parted from him, there was something inside her which wouldn’t accept it. When he tore at her hair and pressed the burning cigarette to her flesh and hissed _I’ll kill you, you bitch, how could you go to him,_ it clung to life and wouldn’t let her let go. So easy to die (easy as slipping over the edge of a cliff), but so hard in practice. There was something both sacred and profane about death, not for mortal hands to touch. Maybe after experiencing something like that, one could not go back. Maybe that was why, after that night in fall, nothing felt the same.

She didn’t remember the events of the bacchanal, but sometimes snippets would return to her-- flashes of images, echoes of hymns, the sticky scent of clotted blood. Impressions and emotions, nothing more, but enough to give her the sense of what happened. She had inhabited the body of a doe, bounding through the woods, almost flying on slender spindle legs. Baying of hounds. Her brother the hart chasing after her with his crown of antlers. Wet black leaves against the back of her neck, toga bunched around her hips, Charles’s scent and the scent of the cold soil. Frantic white-hot ecstasy, the hounds coming ever closer, the inability to care. Sensations swirling up into the cold black air until she didn’t know where she ended and everything else began-- was she full of stars, were those her roots deep in the earth, who had entered whom? The bloody raw madness, her mind blown wide open, dissolving and coalescing a hundred times, a hundred hundred times, time flowing past like cold water and like honey. And through it all, the god running with them.[idk if i should try describing him or not] How could she have told Richard what had happened that night? How could she tell anyone? How could one tack down the numinous with piddly little human words? The experience was unspeakable in the most literal sense. When she tried, the words from her lips were dead leaves, dry and brittle husks compared to the lushness of high summer and the riotous colors of autumn. Of course, after that night, the others had known about their relationship, but that paled in importance beside the overwhelming magnitude of the experience. What did it matter if the two of them, perfect pair, as one since the beginning, made carnal their inherent oneness? After returning from the trance covered in another man’s blood, who among them could have said a word in judgement?

_You killed a wonder,_ she thought, brushing the hair off his forehead with her fingertips. He did not stir. She couldn’t bear being parted from him but could bear the alternative even less. It was his fault and she took solace in that fact. She hadn’t drunk herself away, had never once raised a hand against him. She’d gone to Henry, yes, but hadn’t he gone to Francis, too? It used to boil her blood, fill her with seething bitter impotent jealousy. How could he do that to her? How could he go to bed with someone else when she, his twin, his own self doubled and joined to him from the cradle, waited at home? But she had stood that, even, knowing that what he had with Francis was pale and wan beside the shining perfection and bright symmetry of their own relationship. Besides, she knew he loved her too. The same jealousy burned in him, twin flame of her own jealousy. It had felt right, the way they possessed each other. But now the way he looked at her made her skin crawl, this stranger behind her brother’s face. The god of wine had taken him away from her. Catalyzed the night they’d lost themselves, and now he drank himself further and further away from her. They had touched the divine and had killed twice and the threads of their everyday lives were unraveling. They’d seen the world torn open and now it was falling apart around them. _Birth, reproduction. Death._ The third great mystery marking the end of the others. They’d killed and they’d brought death to themselves. Soon it would be all that was left and they’d fall into its chasm, same as Bunny. _My true love, my twin fawn._ She loved him, but didn’t want to die.

So. Here she was with Henry. Henry of the steady hands and steady voice. If he wasn’t warm, at least he made her feel safe, in a way she hadn’t for months. If he wasn’t her other half, he was special to her in his own way, inspiteof-becauseof his coolness and unflappability and intense, obsessive focus on his interests to the exclusion of all else. It was different from Charles’s warmth and diffuseness. Things weren’t like they were with Charles, they weren’t like what Charles thought (his jealousy, at least, still burned as it always had), but she did love him, in a way. Sometimes she’d reach out and touch him, looking for something, heat, desire. Sometimes it was there, but more often she’d get some surprised, mildly annoyed look, like he couldn’t fathom what would merit breaking his focus. He had an essential coolness where Charles had warmth (or used to have it, before he’d been taken from her), but with the coolness came safety and protection from Charles and from the consequences of that night in the fall. She missed the purity and wholeness of what she’d had with Charles, but the Charles she loved had gone away, and at least she could have security.

Charles stirred under her hand and woke up. “Camilla,” he said, blinking up at her in the dim light that seeped through the blinds.

“Charles.” She took his hand. Close, hushed air. Blood flowing under his skin, the same blood as her own. He wasn’t drunk. His eyes were clear. They looked at each other for a moment. Her brother, her lover, the same as always. It finally hit her-- she was leaving. She squeezed his hand, hoped he didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary. “I love you, you know.”

“I love you, too.” He was still lucid in the mornings, before he’d had anything to drink. Looking into his eyes nearly rent her heart in two. She dropped her gaze to their entwined hands. “Milly, I’m sorry.” He didn’t have to say what for.

“I know.” She swallowed, squeezed his hand. She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t sit here with him or she’d forgive him and call it off. She leaned down, kissed him softly on the mouth. For a moment, the past several months fell away and it was just them, just Camilla and Charles, untouched by death and unaware of the beauty and terror of that mad night. Then she sat up again and caught their reflection in the broken mirror. The shards of glass in the fireplace twinkled at her. 

She stood up and turned away, walked back to her own room. She sat in the middle of the bed and drew her knees up to her chest. Silent sobs shook her body. Outside, she heard the sounds of Charles moving around the kitchen, cabinets opening, the clink of ice into a glass. And finally, many minutes later, the front door opening and closing. Silence.

Camilla wiped her eyes. Her room looked bare, empty of the life with which she and Charles had imbued it over the three years of their habitation. She couldn’t look at it any longer.

She walked out to the living room and called Henry.


End file.
